SAN FRANCISCO — Lateefah Simon arrived for her first day at the top cop’s office in her usual outfit of tracksuit and Pumas, ready to work with young men who were fresh out of prison. Her new boss — the woman who persuaded her to trade her career as a high-profile activist and organizer for a job in the district attorney’s office — wasn’t having it.

“You’re working in government, and government is about service, so you never dress down for your people,” Kamala Harris, then San Francisco’s chief prosecutor, sternly told Simon. “Go home and come back tomorrow in a suit.”

Simon, who is now running for Congress to represent California’s East Bay, said the scolding was “my first taste of Boss Kamala, not Mentor Kamala.” It was an early example, nearly 20 years ago, of Harris’s exacting standards. Simon left her office chastened.

Yet when she walked into work the next day, clad in business casual clothes hastily borrowed from friends, Harris presented her with a shopping bag. Inside were a newly purchased gray pantsuit and a scarf embroidered with an “L” for Lateefah.

“She made it her business to make me better professionally and politically,” Simon recounted this week.

To her, the story illustrates the two sides of Harris: A hard-driving, demanding public servant, who also displayed compassion and kindness behind closed doors, especially with young people, whether they were on her staff or victims of a crime. Those traits helped Harris navigate the notoriously cutthroat world of Bay Area politics, where she rose from intern to district attorney in little more than a decade, building a career that has taken her to the heights of American government.

As Harris assumes the role of Democrats’ likely presidential nominee, those who worked with her and campaigned against her in California say her time in the crucible of her hometown’s politics could be both blessing and burden come November.

Oakland and San Francisco shaped her political instincts, but despite a rich history of producing powerful leaders, the Bay Area has never bred a U.S. president. Indeed, while California has sent several Republicans to the White House, no Democrat from this state has been elected to the nation’s highest office.

In the days since President Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris, conservatives have quickly revived old tropes, tagging her as a “San Francisco liberal” and a “California socialist.” Simon and others say Harris’s early career prepared her to parry such attacks, like an attorney handling cross-examination.

“Every single day of my time with Kamala Harris, I saw not only her rigor and how hard she worked but also how people constantly discounted her and she refused to be anything less than excellent,” he said. “That’s the Kamala who is going to be president of the United States.”

Harris was born in Oakland and raised in a house on Bancroft Way in the formerly redlined Berkeley flatlands. It was from this home that she was bused to an elementary school in the city’s wealthy hills as part of an integration program.

She was 12 when her family left Berkeley for Canada, where her mother taught at McGill University. There, Harris met a friend whose story of abuse would motivate her to become a prosecutor, and when she returned to the Bay Area, it was to study law.

She got her start as an intern in the Alameda County district attorney’s office, a coveted post in an agency with a storied list of alumni, including former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren. Her time there was transformative, Harris wrote in her memoir, “The Truths We Hold.” She recalled helping free an innocent woman who was swept up in a drug bust, a victory she characterized as “a defining moment in my life.”

She landed a full-time job in the office and was eventually assigned to a unit that prosecuted sex crimes, where her team supervisor, Nancy O’Malley, remembers her displaying “an amazing ability to connect with people,” especially young victims of sexual violence.

O’Malley still thinks about one of Harris’s cases, which involved prosecuting a group of young men who had gang-raped a 14-year-old in foster care. The girl, whose testimony would be key to securing a conviction, was wary of the attorneys. But Harris took her hand, comforting and reassuring her.

“What Kamala did was make that girl feel like she was the queen of the world,” O’Malley said. “I will never forget watching their interaction, and this young woman transformed before my eyes.”

Harris remembers the case, too. She won a conviction, she wrote in her memoir, but later heard a rumor that the young victim had fallen back into a cycle of abuse. “It was hard not to feel the weight of the systemic problems we were up against,” Harris acknowledged.

In her telling, the case planted a seed, forcing her to consider policy changes that might disrupt patterns of violence. Others believe she always aspired to higher office.

“She was ambitious,” O’Malley said. “She always had her sights set higher than where she was, appropriately so.”

The DA’s office in Alameda County had a deep bench — including O’Malley, who would eventually become the first woman to hold the top job. But across the Bay Bridge, the path to power appeared easier. And in 1998, Harris accepted a job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

Still, her first political campaign five years later was bruising and difficult.

She was the underdog against her former boss, the incumbent DA Terence Hallinan, as well as longtime prosecutor Bill Fazio. The contest resurfaced a sensitive subject, Harris’s brief romantic relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, a local political kingmaker.

The two had broken up years earlier, but Brown supported Harris’s candidacy, and her critics accused her of benefiting from political patronage. According to her then-campaign consultant, Harris came up with an effective counter. Answering a question at a candidate forum about her independence, she highlighted scandalous accusations made about her two opponents before promising to run a positive, issue-focused campaign.

“She knows how to play politics way better than I ever did,” Fazio, now a Harris supporter, said. “She thinks on her feet, and trial attorneys have to do that because you never know what’ll come next. She’s smart, she’s bright, she’s aggressive.”

Early on, Harris branded her approach “smart on crime” in an attempt to balance law enforcement and liberal values. She opposed capital punishment and called herself a “progressive,” yet the San Francisco Chronicle’s endorsement still declared she was “for Law and Order.”

Harris won, and she and Fazio eventually became friendly, bonding over the loss of their mothers, who died within months of each other. He remembers her as a tough prosecutor and said the Brown attacks — then and now — are “nonsense” that would never dog a male candidate.

In her first years at the DA’s office, Harris increased the conviction rate but also began taking her first real political heat. In 2004, a San Francisco police officer was killed in the line of duty, and soon after Harris announced she would not seek the death penalty against the perpetrator, infuriating police officers and other elected officials. In an op-ed, Harris maintained her position, writing that “there can be no exception to principle.”

She then drew criticism from the left when she instituted a policy punishing parents of truant children with fines and possible jail time, though the latter penalty was never applied and truancy rates fell. Her office was also plunged into scandal after accusations that she had violated the rights of defendants by covering up the misconduct of a police lab technician. Harris later said she wasn’t aware of the problems but took responsibility as head of the office.

Louise Renne, who hired Harris to work in the city attorney’s office before her run for DA, said the vice president is part of an illustrious line of barrier-breaking San Francisco women, including former U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein, who died in September, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who took hits from right and left but “knew how to stand their ground and be firm.”

Harris is far more moderate than either side gives her credit for, Renne said. As district attorney, “Kamala was looking at being very practical,” she said. “People don’t understand that.”

During her second term as DA, Harris announced a bid for California attorney general. The move would take her out of San Francisco and position her more squarely in the national spotlight. As she advanced, some faulted her for being too cautious and often avoiding controversial issues, especially pressing criminal justice matters, said Dan Morain, author of the biography “Kamala’s Way.” Critics said the approach undercut her claims of bold leadership.

Even then, however, her opponents knew she would be a formidable force for years to come. In the 2010 AG race, Republicans — more successful in the state than now — picked a strong candidate to oppose her and poured millions into the contest. They viewed it, Morain said, as their last chance to stymie a promising career.

“If they had beat her in 2010, she would probably be a lawyer at some fancy San Francisco law firm … but that didn’t work and here we are,” he said. “They saw in her a rising star.”

Earlier this month, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) was nowhere to be found as President Biden quietly joked about his age and defiantly declared he would not let anyone “push me out of this race” at a low-key rally in her hometown of Madison.

But just a few days ago, the two-term senator, who faces a tough battle for reelection this year in her swing state, was beaming as she spoke before Vice President Harris in front of a roaring crowd of re-energized Democrats in West Allis.

The scene underscores the feeling of cautious optimism that is boosting Democratic candidates all the way down the ballot in the eight days since Biden stepped aside. Vulnerable Democratic incumbents hoping to hold onto their slim majority in the Senate and flip the House had all but resigned themselves to defeat after Biden’s disastrous debate, and they were running as far away from his candidacy as possible.

Now that Harris has an opportunity to introduce herself to a Democratic base waked up by her candidacy, congressional Democrats are starting to see a path to victory with fewer than 100 days until Election Day, even as Republicans are organizing themselves around a line of attacks they hope will tie Democrats to Harris’s past positions.

“We see huge energy everywhere,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who is running for reelection this year in Virginia, which some polls showed would be close on the presidential level with Biden atop the ticket. “In the events that I’ve done since that announcement, the energy is really, really ratcheting up.”

Still, Harris is battling deep dissatisfaction with inflation and the administration’s handling of the border among voters, and Democrats are facing a brutal Senate map full of purple and red states that favors Republican attempts to wrest back control of the chamber. House Democrats have to win four more seats if all incumbents are reelected to retake the majority.

“The additional enthusiasm that the Democrats have shown will obviously help down ballot races,” said GOP political consultant Whit Ayres. “Whether that will be enough to overcome the other negatives and challenges remains to be seen.”

Democratic strategists running Senate and House campaigns noted an abrupt shift in messaging as soon as Biden, 81, passed the baton to Harris, 59, from an operation focused on the president’s record the last four years to a campaign leaning into the future with slogans like “We’re not going back.”

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who runs the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, called the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, argued the contrast with Trump would be good for Harris and all Democratic candidates.

“Campaigns are about the future. And how the policies they’re fighting for are impacting their lives,” Peters said. “That’s why I think it’s a real problem for Donald Trump he continually dwells on the past.”

House Democrats also see the future-forward messaging as a welcome change. Multiple House Democratic lawmakers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak openly about Biden’s troubles, said the president spent the last several weeks recounting his first-term accomplishments rather than laying out a concrete vision for the future.

Democrats this week cheered on Harris as she embraced “freedom” as a core tenet, and they noted her sharper messaging compared with Biden on abortion rights and other issues.

“We have an opportunity to move past the chaos and extremism and return to normal, pragmatic, reliable leadership, and [voters] get that with her. They get a better understanding of what’s on the line in terms of democracy and how we’re going to strengthen it,” Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said. “It’s also an opportunity not just to say, ‘Here’s who I am,’ but to set the terms of the debate.”

Over the past eight days, the once-depressed Democratic base has wake up, helping amass more money and a volunteer army down-ballot. The Harris campaign said Sunday that it had raked in $200 million in the week since Biden exited the campaign, two-thirds being from new donors.

Earlier this week, the DSCC raised more than a million dollars online two days in a row, the most of the cycle, according to the group. And Peters said the number of statewide volunteers in his state doubled in the four days since Harris announced her candidacy.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had its best day of the cycle in the first 24 hours after Biden’s announcement and one of the best online fundraising days in the House Democratic campaign arm’s history, raising nearly $1 million, they said. In the first nine hours after Biden’s Sunday announcement, the DCCC was raising $1,300 per minute, according to the DCCC.

“I love Joe Biden, but I think it’s a fact that we were having a difficult time activating our base. We have that problem solved,” Rep. Daniel Kildee (D-Mich.) said.

The latest influx of cash is something keeping Republicans up at night because it can take some districts off the competitive map, according to GOP campaign strategists.

“Knowing the path forward has folks incredibly energized, and frankly, our candidates have always been running ahead, so we’ve been on a good path to take back the House from the beginning of the cycle and continue to date,” DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) said.

Both a Siena/New York Times poll and a Wall Street Journal poll published this week showed Harris faring better than Biden among young, Hispanic and Black voters — all key constituencies for Democrats up and down the ballot this fall. But the Siena poll also registered some slippage compared with Biden among older voters, showing the rapidly shifting coalitions that Democrats are still deciphering. An ABC/Ipsos poll released Sunday showed an eight-point spike in Harris’s favorability rating from 35 to 43 percent, with an unfavorable score of 42 percent.

Harris’s strengths have presidential strategists hoping that Sun Belt states including Nevada, Arizona and Georgia may be back in play after the Biden campaign had begun to write them off. That is welcome news for Democrats running for the Senate there: Rep. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.) and Sen. Jacky Rosen (Nev.). Democrats also believe Harris’s candidacy will help incumbents in the “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states Democrats historically have won to secure the White House.

House and Senate Democrats running in swing districts and states had been outperforming Biden before his exit from the campaign — strategists said they continued to do so in the weeks after the June 27 debate.

But Democratic lawmakers feared that if Biden stayed on the ticket, he would eventually doom their chances down-ballot. They worried that Democrats were unlikely to hold onto the Senate if Biden lost, given the fact that even if all their incumbents win, the Senate would be split 50-50 next year. (The president’s party gains control of the Senate in the case of a split.) House Democrats also were concerned that a depressed base would result in historically low voter turnout, which is critical in swing districts where elections are determined at the margins.

“I think the dynamic for them has improved simply because it’s not Biden,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.). “We still are trying to catch up in some of the swing states in the Senate races.”

In the red states of Ohio and Montana, where Sens. Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester, respectively, are fighting for their political lives, it is less clear that Democrats will be aided by Harris at the top of the ticket. Tester is the lone vulnerable Senate incumbent who has not endorsed Harris, even though the Los Angeles Times reported in 2015 that he encouraged her to run for Senate in the first place.

“He’s doing his best to try and get himself aligned with his state, which is going to be really hard because his state is a far cry from the kind of San Francisco liberal policies that Harris brings to the ticket,” said John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said he believed that Harris will eventually help Republican candidates because it’s easier to connect Democrats to her policy positions, which he cast as far left, than to connect them to Biden’s age.

“She is a San Francisco radical, and this just feels a lot like a replay of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis,” Daines said, referencing past failed Democratic presidential nominees. “The nation is not ready for a far-left president.”

That messaging is being used by Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate David McCormick, who released an online ad targeting Sen. Bob Casey (D). In the ad, Casey praises Harris before a lengthy supercut of Harris previously endorsing policies such as banning fracking and discussing “starting from scratch” in designing the agency charged with enforcing immigration law inside the United States. In a memo, the NRSC urged candidates not to “be shy about aggressively tying their opponents to Kamala Harris’ extreme agenda.” (The Harris campaign told reporters this week she now does not support a fracking ban.)

In the House, swing-district Democrats have largely embraced Harris’s candidacy, with many believing she can only improve on her support from here. One House Democrat representing a swing district said they called on Biden to step aside because they had seen 30 months of consistent internal polling that showed Biden not improving against Trump.

“I saw Biden’s ceiling and I think what we see in the polling is Harris’s floor,” said the lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about party leaders.

Democratic Rep. Hillary J. Scholten, who represents a swing district in western Michigan, says she has had many “moderate, even conservative crossover voters” in her district who mention liking Harris’s personality and gravitas, and who consider her a politician “who really means business.”

But Democrats say Harris must use this opportunity to reintroduce herself to a public that does not know much about her as Republicans are sharpening their attacks.

Many swing district Democrats — which represent districts with an almost evenly split mix of Democratic, Republican, and independent voters — are telling Harris’s campaign that she needs to run to the center rather than appeal to the far left.

“You’re in the general now. If Democrats are going to give you the path, you need to run like you understand what it takes to win in a battleground state,” the Democratic House member said. “If you all go off to the left and try to please the ‘Bernie bros,’ you got a problem in battleground states.”

Democrats welcomed Harris latching onto her prosecutorial record to sharply contrast with Trump’s recent felony conviction. Many noted that such an embrace could help them counter GOP attacks that Democrats are soft on crime.

It’s a difference from the Harris 2020 presidential campaign in which she often times softened her record as a prosecutor and attorney general of California in fear of disappointing the liberal base during a crowded Democratic primary.

But Hill progressives are also embracing Harris as a candidate who will continue liberal policies that Biden enacted during his presidency. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was asked by the campaign to stump for Harris in Georgia this weekend. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said Harris’s past positions on climate, abortion and the war in Gaza will continue to excite liberals, especially young voters. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he will do “anything” he can to help elect Harris, but he has not yet formally endorsed her.

It’s exactly what Republicans want to capitalize on.

“That San Francisco liberal wants to turn the whole country into San Francisco,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) at a Trump rally in North Carolina last week. He added that Harris “wants more illegal immigration, she wants free health care for illegals, she wants to defund the police.”

But Harris has brushed off these attacks, portraying a vote for Trump as a ticket to the past. “We’re not going back,” she said in Wisconsin last week, as the crowd began chanting the same.

Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed to this report.

President Biden endorsed sweeping changes to the Supreme Court on Monday, calling for 18-year term limits for the justices and a binding, enforceable ethics code for the high court.

He is also pushing for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit blanket immunity for presidents, a rebuke of the Supreme Court after it ruled this month that former president Donald Trump is immune from prosecution for official acts.

For Biden, who has long resisted calls to reform the Supreme Court, the announcement Monday marked a major shift in his posture toward one of America’s three branches of government. Since assuming the presidency, the Supreme Court has veered sharply to the right — overturning Roe v. Wade, ending affirmative action in college admissions, weakening federal agencies’ power by overturning a 40-year decision and striking down Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program.

“I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today,” Biden wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post published Monday morning. “I have great respect for our institutions and separation of powers. What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”

The president will officially announce his support for the changes during a speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin The Post previously reported that Biden was set to call for these three changes.

The calls, however, are largely aspirational at this stage given the long odds they face in implementation. Term limits and an ethics code are subject to congressional approval, and the Republican-controlled House is unlikely to support either. Both proposals also require 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Democrats only hold 51 seats in the upper chamber. Passing a constitutional amendment requires clearing even more hurdles, including two-thirds support of both chambers, or via a convention of two-thirds of the states, and then approval by three-fourths of state legislatures.

Biden’s proposed amendment, which Biden is calling the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment,” states the “Constitution does not confer any immunity from federal criminal indictment, trial, conviction, or sentencing by virtue of previously serving as president.”

In his op-ed explaining his decision, Biden wrote, “This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one.”

The Supreme Court immunity decision, which came along ideological lines, made it extremely unlikely that Trump would go to trial on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election before voters cast ballots in this year’s presidential contest.

Less than an hour after that decision, Biden called Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, to discuss the ruling and the arguments for and against remaking the court. The next week, Biden called Tribe again, and the two discussed a Guardian opinion piece he wrote endorsing reforms to the Supreme Court. Among the options they discussed: term limits, an enforceable ethics code and the constitutional amendment to address presidential immunity.

Tribe confirmed that he spoke with Biden but declined to comment on their discussion.

Biden’s call for an enforceable ethics code follows a year of scandals at the Supreme Court, largely centered on Justice Clarence Thomas and his lack of disclosures over gifts. Justice Samuel Alito has also come under criticism for flying politically provocative flags at his homes.

Biden wrote that the ethics codes should require justices to “disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.”

The term limits, Biden said, would allow future presidents to appoint a justice every two years and make high court nominations “more predictable and less arbitrary.” He noted that the United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime appointments to its high court justices.

After The Post first reported on Biden’s proposals, former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, criticized the president’s plan.

“The Democrats are attempting to interfere in the Presidential Election, and destroy our Justice System, by attacking their Political Opponent, ME, and our Honorable Supreme Court,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We have to fight for our Fair and Independent Courts, and protect our Country.”

During the 2020 presidential race, Biden rebuffed calls from liberals who advocated expanding the court but he promised he would create a commission to study potential changes. He followed through on that vow after being elected, and the commission issued a 294-page report to the president. Before Monday, Biden had not acted on the commission’s report since it was approved in December 2021.

Biden had been planning to endorse the changes to the high court, even before he last weekend announced he was reversing course and not seeking a second term as president. Biden hinted about his plans during a call with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a call that was part of his unsuccessful effort to keep Democrats united behind his candidacy.

“I’m going to need your help on the Supreme Court, because I’m about to come out — I don’t want to prematurely announce it — but I’m about to come out with a major initiative on limiting the court. … I’ve been working with constitutional scholars for the last three months, and I need some help,” Biden said, according to a transcript of the call obtained by The Post.